


A Validation (On My Sleeve)

by novel_concept26



Category: Pitch Perfect (2012)
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 04:24:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novel_concept26/pseuds/novel_concept26
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She feels beautiful with Chloe in a way she's not used to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Validation (On My Sleeve)

She feels beautiful with Chloe in a way she’s not used to. Beauty isn’t a thing she feels made for, most of the time; her father is too overbearing, and her nerves are too easily rattled, and she wants too much with a vigor that is beyond unhealthy. Beauty isn’t her goal; the dream is what she reaches for, and if the dream means being ugly, or spastic, or not quite right in the head, so be it. It’s about being who she’s always imagined, not about being attractive.

But with Chloe, she feels differently. There’s something about the way blue eyes lock with hers, and the way a wide smile lights up her whole face, and it makes it hard to forget the pleasant twist in her gut. Not love or lust so much as  _need_. She needs to feel the way Chloe makes her feel.

Beautiful.

That’s a new one.

She’s not a beautiful person. She has beautiful  _qualities_ , maybe. She has a beautiful voice, and a beautiful determination, and a beautiful drive to be the best she can be. She has a beautiful sense of hope, and expectation, and—some would say, and she wouldn’t necessarily leap to correct them—madness about her. That’s the closest she has ever come to feeling gorgeous in a real, ridiculously abstract way. That’s the closest she’s been to  _that girl_. The Prom Queen. The ballerina. The trophy wife.

It’s not for her. Her father wishes otherwise, she knows, but tough cookies; she can’t change who she is, and she’s over trying. She’ll never satisfy his beliefs, or his hopes, or  _his_  dreams. It’s idiotic to even care anymore. She doesn’t care.

(She does, and she hates herself for it every day.)

She’s not beautiful, and it makes her feel sometimes like her skin is strung too tight across brittle bones, like the face her parents made is one long, high-cheekboned lie, steady and precise and  _wrong_. She’s not beautiful, and it makes her feel lonely, and damaged, and like throwing up when she dwells on it too long. She is anything but beautiful on a normal day, and when she loses? When she trips up, heels catching in the spaces between the cobblestones of her life plan, and goes down hard on her nose—she’s the least beautiful thing she can imagine.

She can feel the failure, edged in bitten-bloody cuticles, locked beneath paling skin, lodged in the heartbeat that thunders between her ears when her father speaks. She can taste it on her molars, mixed in with metallic dental fillings, and smell it in the perfume that never quite manages to mask the anxiety. She is a bundle of nerves, drawn to snapping, and nothing ever seems to make that go away.

Except for Chloe’s smile. Except for Chloe’s hand on her wrist, stilling her as her head threatens to burst open. Except for Chloe’s voice, mellow and easy in her ears, singing her to sleep. There’s something strangely validating in Chloe’s friendship that makes her think maybe all the rest of it doesn’t matter so much. Just for sparse moments, here and there. Just with Chloe.

She is not beautiful. She is nowhere near. But Chloe sees something in her that no one else ever has, and—probably—no one will again. And because  _Chloe_  is beautiful, and sharp, and kind, and all of the things she is not…

Aubrey guesses that sort of makes her beautiful, too.


End file.
